The Guardian, UK
Oct 13 2006

This ignorant act will only fan the flames of division

The French vote to outlaw denial of the Armenian genocide plays into
the hands of Islamist nationalists in Turkey

Fiachra Gibbons
Friday October 13, 2006
The Guardian

For those who enjoyed a country childhood beyond the reach of a
reliable TV signal, entertainment often consisted of watching two
farmyard animals headbutting each other to the point of
unconsciousness. Typically, two young bullocks would square up to one
another in the way the Turkish donkey and the French ass are doing
today over the Armenian genocide, the collected crimes of French
colonialism, the headscarf, the French insistence that it is their
liberal duty to publish every Muhammad cartoon ever drawn, and any
other raw nerve within reach. Stupider breeds of sheep can keep this
up for hours.

It is pretty poor sport, and one that must take a toll on the limited
reasoning capacities of the creatures involved. Which is why it makes
it all the harder that the supposed excuse for this release of
political testosterone is one of the great forgotten tragedies of the
last century: the massacre – or what some call the genocide – of
around one million Armenians in what is now eastern Turkey. "Who
remembers the Armenians?" Hitler remarked before he set his own
Holocaust in motion. Sadly, few did, even in France.

Turkey has been in headlong and hysterical denial of what was done
between 1915 and 1917 ever since, coming up with one mad face-saving
theory after another to explain how one of Anatolia’s most ancient
populations suddenly disappeared. It is true that Armenian rebels did
their share of slaughtering, and that famine, chaos and Kurdish
land-grabbers played their part as the Ottoman empire collapsed amid
multiple invasions and uprisings. But Ataturk, one of whose adopted
daughters was an Armenian survivor of the forced death marches,
should have – but never could – bring himself to face the truth,
possibly because of his shame at what his brother army officers had
ordered while he was in Gallipoli fighting off the British. (Nor must
we forget that Churchill urged the Armenians to rebel, with vague
promises of support to divert manpower from his sorry mess in the
Dardanelles.)

But the taboo about even mentioning the Armenians has been slowly
broken over the last four years, helped along by the brilliant and
the brave, chief among them the novelist Orhan Pamuk. He has been
prosecuted for "insulting Turkishness" by claiming that a million
Armenians died. What irony that the same Turkish nationalists who
wanted to lynch him then will today be celebrating his Nobel prize
win. Pamuk’s right to freedom of speech was yesterday on the lips of
the French parliamentarians who voted through the bill that would
jail for a year anyone who questions the use of the word genocide for
the killings. No one seemed to have heard that Pamuk himself, in
common with all Turkish liberals, had condemned the bill. It is of
course a cynical exercise to harvest the sizeable Armenian vote, but
so out of touch are the Parisian elite with their suburbs that they
fail to realise the size of the Turkish minority. Officially, of
course, it is illegal to count them, as everyone is French and
nothing else.

That the French – who last year voted to compel teachers in the
immigrant suburbs to teach children the benefits of colonisation
before seeing sense – should act now speaks of profound ignorance and
self-satisfaction. It may also prove to be one of their most
inopportune sallies from port since Villeneuve set sail for
Trafalgar.

For many in France this is not a fight for historic accuracy but
another excuse to point out the differences between the east and
west, between Islam and liberal values, and draw a line at where
Europe ends. France is the fiercest opponent of Turkey’s EU entry. It
is also a place in which the climate is such that a schoolteacher has
become a hero of free speech after unleashing a poisonous tirade
against Muslims in Le Figaro that would have landed him in court
elsewhere.

Turkey and France are seen, from Paris now at least, as
irreconcilable opposites, embodiments of the "clash of civilisation".
Except, of course, they are not. They are in fact, peas in a pod – in
many ways the two most similar states in Europe. Both are fanatically
secular republics, saved from self-destruction by military strongmen
(Napoleon and Ataturk). Both ban the headscarf in schools and are led
by often-remote elites who see religion as a kind of mental
affliction. Both lost great empires but still have the mentalities
that went with them, and both are perpetually convinced that the rest
of the world is plotting to undermine their imminent resurgence.

While the French elite are still petrified by the old Napoleonic fear
of the mob, now transposed to the often nominally Muslim kids from
the suburbs, the Turkish military secular establishment see any show
of religious faith as a harbinger of a fundamentalist takeover. Entry
into Europe means relaxing the iron grip they have imposed in three
coups in a generation. That is why many in the Ankara barracks will
be happy to see Nicolas Sarkozy and Ségolène Royal compete with each
other to demand that, in their eyes, Turkey humiliates itself yet
again by making a full and frank confession before being admitted to
the top table of civilised nations.

This confirmation that Europe is a closed Christian club also plays
into the hands of the resurgent Islamist nationalists in Turkey,
whose ranks may or may not contain the present prime minister, Recep
Tayyip Erdogan, a man who one day presents himself as an advocate of
multicultural tolerance and the next as an old-fashioned Turkish
xenophobe. His own very hazy grip of history was demonstrated
yesterday when he declared that "in our history we never had any
inquisition, dark ages or colonialism" – curiously forgetting the
Ottoman empire, of which he is a fervent nostalgic.

Just as with butting heads, brains seems to suffer when talk turns to
clashing civilisations. The countless Armenian dead are testimony to
the danger of forgetting, and how the past cannot be ignored or
covered up. Equally we should remember that Nicolas Sarkozy’s
great-grandparents were also citizens of the Ottoman empire, living a
few streets away from Ataturk in Salonika, both comfortable members
of the Islamo-Judeo elite. That is not a combination of words we see
often now. What we forget in a few generations.

· Fiachra Gibbons is writing a book on the Ottoman legacy in Europe
comment@guardian.co.uk